As if Greece’s “new type of civil war” weren’t enough for Europe-watchers to fret over, yesterday a group of young activists in France took over a mosque site. The group, Génération Identitaire, has recently emerged with an agenda of “native rights” advocacy of a strident sort. They aim at nothing less than the end of non-white immigration into France and the ceasing of mosque construction.

They didn’t take over just any mosque construction site, rather one at Poitiers, very near where Charles Martel stopped the invading Muslims in 732, thereby saving Western Europe for Christendom. The GIers explained their intent, in which about a hundred activists pulled an “Occupy the Grand Mosque” demo, in direct language:

By this first major action, Génération Identitaire places itself in the forefront of the struggle for our identity. 1,300 years ago Charles Martel stopped the Arabs in Poitiers in a heroic battle which saved our country from the Muslim invasion. It was October 25, 732. Now it is 2012 and we face the same choice: live free or die. Our generation refuses to see her people and her identity disappear through indifference. We will never be the Native Indians of Europe. From this place, this important symbol of our past and of the bravery of our ancestors, we send a call to memory and combat!

As if that wasn’t enough to cause hyperventilation among all bien-pensants, the bulletin ended on a stirring, no-surrender sort of note: “Aware that our fight has only just begun, we call on all young Europeans to become heirs of their destiny and to join the vanguard of youth that stands tall. May all Europe hear our call: RECONQUEST!”

Needless to add, France’s intellectual class has freaked out. Paris manifestly does not approve. The media has condemned GI harshly, as has the government; Manuel Valls, the interior minister, denounced the Poitiers action as “hateful provocation.” However, as GI pointed out, theirs was actually a counter-provocation, as the imam of the coming Grand Mosque had stated that the choice of that location, near the site of Charles Martel’s victory so many centuries ago, was intentional.

On the plus side, nobody got hurt here and, despite some anger on the part of France’s Muslims about this, there’s been no violence    stemming from this act, at least not yet. But I’m not overly optimistic that things will stay so peaceful. Radicalism begets counter-radicalism … which usually begets more radicalism. And then things get really unpleasant.

The boys and girls of Génération Identitaire may be small in number but they have ample courage of their convictions, and they seem deadly serious about all this. Plus, they did warn everyone this sort of thing was coming. A couple weeks ago they released a jarring video which amounted to a fullbore repudiation of not just immigration and multiculturalism, but pretty much the whole French system of the last half-century. Not fond of word-mincing, GI called the video “A Declaration of War”; the text merits a full read:

We are Génération Identitaire.

We are the generation who get killed for glancing at the wrong person, for refusing someone a cigarette, or having an “attitude” that annoys someone.

We are the generation of ethnic fracture, total failure of coexistence, and forced mixing of the races.

We are the generation doubly punished, condemned to pay into a social system so generous with strangers it becomes unsustainable for our own people.

Our generation are the victims of the May ’68-ers who wanted to liberate themselves from tradition, from knowledge, and authority in education. But they only succeeded in liberating themselves from their responsibilities.

We reject your history books to re-gather our memories.

We no longer believe that “Khader” could ever be our brother. We have stopped believing in a “Global Village” and the “Family of Man.”

We discovered that we have roots, ancestry, and therefore a future. Our heritage is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs to our own future.

We turned off the TV to march the streets. We painted our slogans on the walls. Cried through loudspeakers for “youth in power,” and flew our Lambda flags high. The Lambda, painted on proud Spartans’ shields, is our symbol.

Don’t you understand what this means? We will not back down, we will not give in. We are sick and tired of your cowardice. You are from the years of post-war prosperity, retirement benefits, S.O.S Racism and “diversity,” sexual liberation and a bag of rice from Bernard Kouchner.

We are 25 percent unemployment, social debt, multicultural collapse, and an explosion of anti-white racism.

We are broken families, and young French soldiers dying in Afghanistan.

You won’t buy us with a condescending look, a state-paid job of misery, and a pat on the shoulder. We don’t need your youth-policies. Youth IS our policy.

Don’t think this is simply a manifesto. It is a declaration of war. You are of yesterday, we are of tomorrow.

To be fair to GI, other Europeans, some tied to major political parties, have said some of that before. A couple years go, the Northern League, the biggest party in much of northern Italy, got everyone’s attention with posters comparing the fate of Native Americans to Europeans today (“They had immigration – now they live on reservations”: see right). In neighboring Austria, the never very subtle Freedom Party – which is doing very well in the polls these days, perhaps not coincidentally – has invoked imagery of lifting the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, and also came out with some rather direct posters (“The West in Christian hands”). But nobody before has tied together such a comprehensive attack on the whole post-modern European system, as GI has done. And no one else has gone around occupying mosque sites.

This is gonna get interesting, fast. I predict that if GI keeps this up, violence will eventually emerge. On the other hand, if leaders in France, and many European countries, don’t address the socioeconomic concerns of angry young people who feel near-hopeless, disenfranchised by decades of corruption, and alienated by multiculturalism, as well as victimized by immigrant crime (just like in Greece), this will continue and grow. Plus, I doubt that people who adopt Spartan symbols will give up that easily. Hold on, this ride may get bumpy.